Social bookmarking is the habit or practice of saving bookmarks to a web site and “tagging”. Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. Social bookmarking started as a method for Internet users to keep bookmarks that can easily be accessed online and shared with other users in the Web. These bookmarks are given tags to label as well as organize them and the tags illustrate a glimpse of the main content for easier access.

In a social bookmarking system, internet users save links to web pages that they would like to remember and/or share. These social bookmarks are normally public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. Only the allowed people can view these social bookmarks sequentially, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

But don’t let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and classification is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in judging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.

Social bookmarking brings to the equation something that search engines can’t compete with the human touch. Just as the internet has millions of pages, so it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they’ve found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.

Social bookmarking allows you to share your bookmarks with other Internet users in a collaborative sort of way. Normally, social bookmarking takes place on sites where the users can create an account to add their bookmarks to. It’s also helpful to do it on sites that allow you to insert keywords for the types of bookmarks you add. That way, they all can be organized and set into categories that other users can easily search through.

Social bookmarking is a grassroots process that allows users to establish the value of a specific web page, article, podcast, or video. By bookmarking an item, individuals are casting a vote to endorse that specific resource. The idea is that social bookmarking gives a resource credibility; the more users who bookmark a specific item, the more valuable the resource is considered to be. Social bookmarking is all about the collective voice. Most of the social bookmarking networks increase the profile of items that receive a lot of bookmarks. It probably won’t be long before the major search engines begin to include social bookmarks as a part of their ranking algorithms.

Once you become a part of a social bookmarking site, you become a member of that community. You and all the other users are there for the same thing and you can help each other out in finding sites that will benefit all of you. It also makes searching the Web so much easier and quicker. Another great thing is that once you’re part of a site, you can access it from any computer and any browser. That way, you’re never limited in seeing the social bookmarks you’ve been waiting for.

So, the question, “Should you give any attention to social bookmarking?” And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web spiders as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more “votes” you get! Links which are bookmarked by lots of users on social bookmarking web sites are effectively been “voted for” In fact Google has already started to feature StumbleUpon Reviews in its search results.

On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.

Social bookmarking sites help you find great content on the internet. These websites allow users to post content that they like. They also allow them to list and share this content with other users. You need to become a member of these sites first. Some of them are very particular about admitting the right people to their sites, but generally it is quite easy to sign up. The best part is that these sites are free for all internet users.

Social bookmarking leverages the popular social software phenomenon of tagging. Users can apply tags, or keywords, to the bookmarks they save. In social bookmarking, tagging creates a grass-roots taxonomy for the shared bookmarks. Users can search by tags to find bookmarks relevant to their interests. Taxonomies created through bookmarking are called “folksonomies.”

The majority of Web users nowadays are familiar with the term bookmarking — formally known as social bookmarking. Every time you save a Web Site to your list of favorites, with the intent of visiting it again in the future, you are actually bookmarking it.

Social bookmarking is also a way of bringing additional traffic to your site as there are many users who look at the ‘what’s new’ page and decide what to click on. An easy way of tackling social bookmarking is to use Onlywire or Diigo, both of which submit to multiple social bookmarking sites. Once you’ve signed up, this will submit to all the sites except reddit and digg.

Social bookmarking is a way for people to store and organize bookmarks of certain web pages on the Internet with help of metadata. Social bookmarking is done by saving your links to particular web pages that you want to remember or perhaps, share with other users. Social bookmarking is an all-out phenomena and is growing at a sonic boom clip. Understanding social bookmarking gives you the ability to reach millions of users you might otherwise miss. Properly utilizing social bookmarking gives you an additional edge in more traditional search engine marketing.



By: Paul Mihai Pavel

A lot of people are using the Web for a number of reasons. Some use the Web in order to find certain information that are related and relevant to their field of expertise and specialty, while others merely just search for particular subjects that they want to save for themselves, which could later on be viewed again, and maybe be used for whatever purpose that the user had in mind. You can even get the information that you are seeking from e-mails of other people, or from subscribing to several newsletters, as well as use search engines to uncover the resources that you may need.

Back then, people would organize their bookmarks of online resources using folders in the Web browser, an inefficient way of organizing since people may need to save a resource that is relevant to a number of categories, thereby saving the bookmarked online resource in a number of different folders.

This can be a bit difficult to handle, especially if people need to find the references that they have saved in order to send it to other people through e-mail. Now that social bookmarking is possible, people are now able to create a web of resources and connections without being limited in its applications and operations in the same way as people would be when they did not use social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking, in this case, allows its users to easily and efficiently direct people to the resources or references that they have been able to search, locate, tag and saved. By using only relevant keywords, the user who was able to tag the social bookmarked website can direct people to the website or Web page that they have saved and bookmarked just by looking at the keywords used by the user.

Social bookmarking has been developed based on the bookmarking capabilities of certain websites, thereby making it a whole lot easier for people to not only organize information and categorize resources, but also make social connections with other people who may be interested in the topics or subjects that they have tagged and bookmarked for themselves.

In social bookmarking, people can see who created each bookmark on a particular topic or subject in a particular Web page or website, as well as allows the other person to have easy access to that other person’s bookmarked resources or references. Aside from this, its users can also see all the other users who have used a particular tag or keyword, allowing them to search for all relevant resources and references about the same topic or subject.

Social bookmarking opened a lot of doors for its applications. Nowadays, people not only use social bookmarking for saving and categorizing resources and references, but they take advantage of social bookmarkings web of social connections, using it as a vessel for online marketing for a lot of online businesses, which is proving to be a very effective tool. People also use social bookmarking as a means to improve and boost their site’s traffic, as well as a way to improve their ranking in search engines.

Vanessa Arellano Doctor

http://wirefan.com



By: Vanessa Arellano Doctor

Social bookmarking is the best way to boost traffic for a site. Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. The ideas that social bookmarking is built on are working their way into other applications; the practice of tagging information is being extended to other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail. Social bookmarking is saving us a lot of time and energy that we’d usually spend scanning our RSS feeds or (the shock and horror of it all) actually visiting sites daily to find out what’s hot in the industry we work in along with our other interests. Not learning about social bookmarking is nothing short of surrendering to a changing online world.

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Bookmarking is good for two things: Building more inbound links to your blog and driving traffic to your blog. Social bookmarking has become so competitive that people are asking for votes for every single thing that they put up on the Internet, which entirely defeats the purpose of the entire social bookmarking industry.

Yes, put up all of the content that you want on your blog or your website, but don’t clog up the social bookmarking system by voting for everything that comes your way, or asking for votes on every single thing that you write. People who are trying to become popular on all of these different websites are just compounding the problem by once again “clogging up” the social bookmarking system, not to mention annoying their social bookmarking friends by asking for votes on so many different websites all the time. If you really want to try out more than just 3 or 4 social bookmarking sites, then simply build up your presence in one community, and then move on to other communities later. Get involved in social bookmarking groups where all members agree to give due diligence to each other’s vote requests, and then manage the entire process via email. Adding friends on social bookmarking sites is nothing more than a “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” arrangement, and often that leads to seriously one-sided efforts.

Social bookmarking is a free and easy way to get loads of traffic to your website. Millions of people are abandoning traditional search engines and directories in favor of social bookmarking services. Digg is the most heavily-trafficked social bookmarking site (at the moment), followed closely by Stumbeupon. With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. And, making matters even sweeter for those in the know is the fact that successful mastery of the social bookmarking scene has Google advantages, too.

One thing is for sure: Social bookmarking is a technology whose time has come, and once corporate America discovers it, advertising will surely follow. Combination of article writing,blogging,RSS and social bookmarking is essential if you want targeted traffic to your site. Another valuable use of social bookmarking is to gain insight into how your brand is perceived by the users saving and tagging your (or your competitors) website or content. If your goal is traffic then blogging combined with social bookmarking is a guaranteed formula for success.



By: Paul Rodgers

Every day new Internet businesses start without a blog of their own. This is one reason they fail within the first couple of years. You can become an Internet business success if you learn how to combine blogging and social bookmarking to make more money.

One: You first need to find all of the relevant social bookmarking sites for your business. Join one or as many as you want to, just make sure that you find sites that are used by a lot of other people. The bigger the social site is the better for your business.

Some of these should include OnlyWire.com, Digg, Google and Yahoo. There really are thousands of sites you can bookmark your blog posts too.

Two: Once you have found the ones that you want to use you want to become active. The more active you are in each social bookmarking site, the more exposure you will get to your blog.

Explore all of the social activities that are available to you and use everyone you can. For example you can increase your traffic when you submit your site to all applicable bookmarks consistently. Not to mention the search engine bait benefits you will see.

Three: You want to make sure that you constantly update your blog and check in at the social bookmarking site a couple of times a week. What will keep people coming back is if you constantly update your content.

Plus adding fresh content will keep search engines spidering it more often as well. You can never get too many visits from a search engine.

Four: Invite your friends and family to use the social bookmarking site. This will help to increase your popularity in the social site, which will mean more traffic for you. And they may even be able to offer you a few content ideas!

Five: Target your niche market that would want your products or services the most. This will help you find other social bookmarking sites for your blog.

Six: Advertise your blog and make sure that the social bookmarking sites that you are a member of are listed on your blog. Encourage others to bookmark your site.

All the above are creative ways to handle the issue of social bookmarking, blogging, and earning money. If you can apply several of these to your internet business you too can earn more and grow your business quicker.



By: Tracey Merrells Fort

Ever since people first began browsing the Internet, they came across websites that they wanted to keep track of. The easiest way for them to be able to do this was to bookmark the webpages so that they were easily accessible within their web browser. Since that time, however, things have really changed and now people access the Internet through a variety of different methods. Not only do they access it through their computer at home, they also access it at work and at times, even whenever they are on the road. This can make it very difficult for them to find what they are looking for, particularly if they leave their bookmarks at home. This problem has been overcome, however, through the use of social bookmarking, a process in which people store their bookmarks online instead of keeping them on their computer.

This has several distinct advantages to an individual, but for us that are involved in Internet marketing, it is a literal gold mine. The people that leave their bookmarks on the Internet and the social bookmarking websites typically do it out in the open in order to share their bookmarks with other individuals. The fact of the matter is, the search engines love these websites just as much as their users do and this creates a unique opportunity for us to be able to get recognized by the search engines quickly. The only hard part about this is that posting the information to these websites can be a very time consuming task. That is, of course, unless you have some social bookmarking software that will automate much of the process for you.

A good piece of social bookmarking software is going to be able to automatically log into all of your accounts and add a bookmark of your choice. The only difficult part about all of this is typically going each and every one of these websites and signing up for the individual accounts. Some social bookmarking software has actually overcome this by automating the process as well. The best part about it is that once you put one of these programs to use, you are going to find that you are not only recognized by the search engines quickly, you will rise through the ranks quickly as well. It is certainly one piece of software that anybody who is involved in Internet marketing should make good use of.



By: Deep Arora

Social Bookmarking could be one of the best things that ever happened to websites and blogs.

Basically Social Bookmarketing sites allow users to create a set of content bookmarks. These bookmarks are organized by tags, which are (usually) arbitrary words or phrases the user can assign to content. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize content using tags. The most popular Social Bookmarking Site is del.ici.ous, which has millions of users.

Social Bookmarking sites have an intrinsic advantage over search engines and other bots — people choose what to bookmark rather than relying on a program to categorize and qualify content. There is an implied quality in something that someone has taken the time to select.

Social Bookmarkers read other people’s bookmarks and add them to their own if they like them. There are also RSS feeds so people can see what others are tagging, which I think is really cool, and a textbook example of viral marketing.

About 4% of my referrers this month are del.icio.us related, including .8% off the home page, meaning that people click on my link when they see it pop up in their RSS feed. I get a goodly amount of traffic from technorati as well, but I would call that site a business bookmarking site, so I’m not going to mention it here.

I only provide a facility on AffiliateBlog for del.icio.us tagging. There is a terrific WordPress plugin called Sociable that allows direct tagging for tons of Social Bookmarking sites. If you don’t have it as part of your blog you should get it and install it today. This blog is being redesigned and should be done in a few weeks. The new design will incorporate Sociable.

So…what can YOU do to get the social bookmarking virus ramped up? I see two basic considerations:

1. Write good content. Darren Rouse had an interesting observation about del.icio.us items that make it to the top of the site. You can take a look, but basically he observes that lists, how-tos, technical articles and humor get to the top faster.

2. Give people the tools to bookmark easily. If you have a blog, use Sociable. It’s terrific. If you have a site, there are plenty of interesting tools that will help you make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your content. AddtoBookmarks.com is a good one.

There are Social Bookmarking sites popping up all over the place. Here are the Top 10. Where did I find them? In someone’s bookmark list on Listable, of course.

Del.icio.us

Listible

Digg

StumbleUpon

BlinkList

Spurl

Magnolia

Furl

BlogMarks

Reddit



By: Matt Deangelis

Getting listed on the social bookmarking websites is one of the initial phases of getting your website listed in the search engines. Yes, there are plenty of ways that you are able to get your website listed but if you want to be recognized quickly and to move up through the search engine rankings with ease, it is difficult to beat what social bookmarking can bring you. Unfortunately, it can also be difficult for you to have the time to take care of this process, as it can be quite time consuming. Often, if we try to manage every aspect of our business including social bookmarking, we can be overwhelmed and not accomplish anything at all.

The easiest way for you to overcome this is to employ the use of social bookmarking automation software. This will help to cut down on the amount of time that it takes to get your webpages listed on the social bookmarking websites and to get them listed in the search engines themselves. Since there are a lot of different options as far as the software is concerned, I thought that it would be important to cover some of the basics of the software and discuss some of the options so that you know what to look for.

First of all, any good social bookmarking automation software is going to be fully automated, every step of the way. After all, the last thing that you want to do is to try and automate a process and then to have to manually go in and micromanage every step that you take. A good software program is going to get you signed up on the social bookmarking websites automatically, post the links automatically and then follow up on any changes that come about in the social bookmarking websites themselves. This is the only way that you’re going to find your success by using one of these software packages and not end up frustrated in the process.

Looking for various reviews of social bookmarking automation software will help you to be able to make a wise decision. After you have the software up and running, you would be surprised with how efficient it is and how much time you will be able to save by not doing these things manually. You will then be able to take the time that you save and put it into efficiently running the rest of your business.



By: Deep Arora